Follow the Leader is a coming of age story about three teenage boys, each with the dream of becoming President of United States. Director Jonathan Goodman Levitt followed these focused young men, born as Reagan left office and the Berlin Wall fell, for three years, from high school though Election Night 2008. These upper-middle class, conservative kids, each living in traditional “all-American” towns, are enthralled by politics. They grew up shaped by 9/11 which forever altered their post-Reagan childhood beliefs that America was invincible.

We first meet the three protagonists while they attend Boys’ State, a week’s training where many future leaders (from President Bill Clinton to Astronaut Neil Armstrong to Broadcaster Tom Brokaw) have gone since 1935 to hear current leaders’ advice. (Note that it’s Boys State, no girls allowed!)

For Ben Trump, living in Fairfax, Virginia, whose great uncle worked for Ronald Reagan, being a conservative Republican is second nature for him. A gifted member of his school’s speech team whose parents recently divorced, Ben spends his summer between high school and college interning for Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s most conservative state senator, going door to door and creating the negative ads that bring in the needed votes. In college, he throws himself into conservative causes and bemoans the difficulty of being conservative in college. With his good looks and charming manner, Ben seems headed for a place in GOP politics.

Since he was a toddler, D. J. Beauregard wanted to be President. Focused and dedicated, a political operative even in high school–he managed a political campaign in his hometown on the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border where Raytheon is the major employer–DJ begins to question his political views and future after high school graduation and a stint working in local political campaigns.

Nick Troiano creates a youth coalition in his town, only to be attacked by rivals–his website is defaced on the night of its launch. While unwavering in his conservative beliefs, he realizes the benefit of bipartisan unity and throws himself into Unity08, an Independent third party in the 2008 election, as well as developing a political Internet broadcast program while attending American University.

These three young men–speakers at their high school graduation, engaged in the politics, conservative yet questioning–all vote for the first time in the 2008 election, which they recognize as a pivotal change in American politics. They also recognize–as do we, the audience–that white men still dominate American politics. Ben, DJ and Nick offer us insight into a generation that will shape and possibly become our nation’s leaders over the coming decades, as director Levitt lets the camera roll and boys speak for themselves.

Well…I learned about that program and many other leadership training / civics programs in high school. I was someone who used to get ask to take part. When I was considering a move back home to the States after a decade in London, these programs were a starting point for figuring out what it meant for this new generation of kids to be American…

Well, yes, no girls are allowed at Boys State, and no boys are allowed at Girls State…that’s true. We do deal with that in the film, particularly in one scene where our character Nick is challenged by his friend Kathryn who attended Girls State about how the programs are different — because they are. And they’re different in every state as well. BUT I should point out that this sequence featuring Boys State is in fact only the first 2 MINUTES of the film, where we meet our main characters — it’s a jumping off point for a three-year journey which takes each of them in very different directions personally and politically…

Yes, President Reagan was very influential to my childhood too…I was born in 1975, and grew up in the 1980s. I think a lot of what we’re trying to say in the film is that environment, location, family background — all of these have a lot to do with how our personal politics develop, though they are not necessarily predictive.

As for myself, yes, I would say I was relatively politically active as a teenager — though I didn’t really come from a political family. Reagan wasn’t really a hero or a villian to me growing up, but someone who was clearly shaping the way the we saw politics and our lives…it was never lost on me that he was an actor playing the role of leader of the free world, so to speak…

And yes — while I don’t want to dwell here, because we’re only talking about the film’s opening sequence which shows just how conservative the three boys all are at the beginning of the filming in 2006 — I went to Boys State as a teenager growing up in Essex County, New Jersey. I went to West Essex High School, and would get chosen for stuff like that. But it was a very different time…peace time, if you will, and programs that train “young leaders” change in America when the country is or sees itself at war, as in the long wake of 9/11.

Yes…that’s true of course. With President Clinton’s two terms in the middle here. I was in high school and college during Clinton’s Presidency, and the boys in the film were little kids when he was in office…there’s a whole sequence in the film about D.J. nostalgia for this simpler time in the film — but for these guys it’s about nostalgia for their childhood, rather than a peace time that they weren’t old enough to remember.

Thanks for linking to our website, Bev! I wish it were more updated — our distribution has come together quickly in the last while, and a lot has happened that is more up to date on http://www.facebook.com/followtheleaderfilm

Choosing our characters was not unlike casting for any film — it’s about how it feels as a director, and how you think the characters (or participants, though I prefer characters because we only have what we film rather than their entire beings to portray in the film). I wanted to film three guys because I think men are still running the country today for the most part — and we need to have a conversation in a new way about our politics…rather than an aspirational film about what I wanted to see in the future, I wanted to make a film about political realities that would be provocative. So I had as a condition finding characters who could have been leaders at most any time in our history. I also wanted to pick people whose politics I didn’t understand but who I liked personally — all of which were an overall challenge that led me to meet thousands of boys and girls before I chose the main characters.

I met D.J. (David Junior) first, and he was immediately charismatic. He was just a charming, and charmingly goofy, kid who had all these great ideals. He was an inspiring, contagiously energetic guy to be around. That was by far the easiest choice. He was just larger than life at 16. I was really impressed with how he operated as an adult politician the first times we met – like, he would get phone calls from actual adult politicians asking for his endorsement, and he would talk with them as someone who had the very real power he had to influence a local election. He was coming off running the campaign for the top vote-getter in the last City Council election, I think. I met him at a leadership training conference on the first day of our shoot when we had filmed earlier in the day with Ted Kennedy…and then here was this kid who didn’t necessarily look the part, but certainly played it very well.

When I first met him Ben, I asked him one question, and I think he spoke for 15 minutes without stopping, and he told me everything about his life as if he were on the news. It was immediately apparent that Ben had a lot going on “professionally,” but his parents were also going through a divorce, as mine had when I was his age. He had a very interesting personal motivation to go into politics that partly related to his father’s leaving his mom; he wanted to prove his father wrong in a way, but the experience also had a direct impact on his personal political values. In fact, when I met Ben, one of the first politicians he told me he admired was the “honorable Barack Obama, the great senator of the state of Illinois,” and within weeks his openness to the politicians on the Democratic side had already changed. Ben seemed very plugged into politics in his local area and was incredibly ambitious. He was a star – as even his eventual mentor in the film Ken Cuccinelli (a rising Republican star himself, who’s now Virginia’s Attorney General and the likely Republican nominee for Governor in 2013) used to say. For a wannabe politician, he was also disarmingly honest and earnest, and I wanted to see how Ben worked through his personal challenges as he became an adult.

Nick was the last character I settled on because in many ways it wasn’t clear that he would be open enough to let us film him. I was impressed in what he did in high school. He was that kid who everyone in town has high hopes for, the All-American leader who carries the hopes of his small town for everyone. But whether he would be willing to be open to the camera – so that he would be a sympathetic character to viewers as he was to me personally – was unclear at the beginning. Before I decided that he would definitely even be in the film, Nick and I got to spend time filming and just hanging out with his family, on probably even 10 occasions. Eventually he trusted me enough to tell his story. At the end of the day, Nick is like many of the best characters in documentaries because he’s a reluctant participant. As a viewer, you’re getting special access to a private person because they have a relationship with the filmmaker, not because he or she is someone who has a strong desire to have their lives filmed all the time…even if he would enjoy being interviewed for the Nightly News. In the end, Nick’s story is certainly a personal one, but it also became a real entry point into public opinion generally. His journey, more than the other guys’, inhabits the nation’s journey. He was and continues to channel a lot of what’s happening with the attitudes for many among the millennial generation.

On the creative side, it was a formal challenge to make a film with three non-overlapping stories — a long edit, and a challenging shoot that I conducted almost entirely alone.

But the harder part was actually the financing and distribution, especially here in the U.S., where people in the industry, decision-makers if you will, were highly resistant to a film that portrayed young conservatives on their own terms without attacking them.

Hope that my long response about choosing the characters covers this question, but please follow up if I haven’t answered it fully…we do discuss this a lot at Q&A because people come to a film about young leaders expecting a diverse cross-section of the country among the characters — when the reality remains that we don’t really have political diversity in all manner of ways in our country, and from my perspective a film that presents what’s essentially a dream doesn’t start the conversations we need to create the change we want. I wanted to try something new and provoke people to have a different type of discourse, though the film itself goes out of its way to be fair to all political points of view…

Yes…they all wish they could go back to the 1980s…but the joke (one of many ironies in the film) is that they were all born in 1989 or 1990. So they don’t really know the sort of ‘back to the future’ world in which they want to ‘return’!

Is there a reason you did not pick a young woman to follow in the film? How have the young women responded to the film? It was nice to see Nick and Kathryn discussing the difference between the sexes in politics.

Thanks for your comment, Steve. Yes, that is one reading…though in the course of the film you see some movement and questioning in (some of) the characters. If you see the film, I hope you don’t still see them as sociopaths — though I do think that part of the problem is that people on the left view those people on the right as such and vice versa. The guys in the film are products of their environments and experience, no more or less…

In some ways they do feel — and I’m not justifying it by explaining or describing it, and certainly not advocating it — like they have no choice but to choose a careerist path. And to choose a path that actually limits their actual life experience…which I think is a problem for a lot of our present leaders and wannabe leaders today…if there wasn’t such a concern about losing ground or doing something that would “haunt” them, they would take more personal risks and be better placed to make better decisions about other people’s lives…

Yes…Ben worked for Ken Cuccinelli, for Bob McDonnell, for Tom Davis and for a lot of Republican candidate in Northern Virginia. You see him doing the nuts-and-bolts work in the film. Definitely rewarding and formative for him as you say. He’s taken an academic path, while also starting to work on policy analysis for a research branch of the U.S. Army — Army Corps of Engineers I think it is — part time. Ben has a very pragmatic view of politics and of life that I think was born out of his work for the Republican establishment near where he grew up…and out of his own childhood experiences as you see in the film during his parents divorce.

My pleasure…and I think one thing people will see in the film is a recognition by the young men who feature is that they recognize this too. But they disagree about what should be done to create “equality of opportunity” in the country…and in part they believe as they do because they haven’t been exposed to diversity themselves. A lot of the time progressives will look at people like those in the film and just say they’re evil or something worse — and I got accused of worse simply by associating with them and doing my best to tell their stories — but I think the worst thing we _should_ say is that each of them is ignorant in some ways of how other people live, ignorant of how the world works. And that’s frankly a process that we all go through as we grow up…so that’s a lot of what you’ll see happening — a shedding of some of that ignorance through more varied experience and influences — during the course of the film.

I actually don’t think that’s unusual at all, though Ben was a bit younger than most staffers — who are usually late teens to mid-twenties…some others reading could probably specify this or also contribute from their experience. I think campaigns across the board, across the political spectrum, rely on cheap, youthful, energetic labor, and that’s what you see in the film to some extent.

People younger than that are also creating their own campaign “ads” and putting them up on YouTube all the time now…and I think the quality of what some “random people” put up on their own rivals or surpasses what Ben did for Ken Cuccinelli as you see in the film. This was a local campaign after all. But I suppose on the bigger campaigns they’re not really directed by the campaign itself.

Yes, he certainly does! We were on an MTV chat show recently and Ben said on air that he still wanted to be President…and his now wife Anna (Ben and Anna got married 2 weeks ago and are currently on their honeymoon) said that she too “wanted to live in the White House!” Good for him for sticking to his guns, so to speak. His honesty about what he was thinking and feeling really made working with him as a filmmaker such a joy — and I wish more people in public life would just say what they truly feel like Ben does. Say what you will about him, but Ben’s authentic.

Glad you asked about Reality Check Interactive, because it’s an important part of our distribution strategy — that runs throughout the next academic year with a college and community tour of events nationwide that use the film as a jumping off point for a wider and more provocative discussion.

Essentially, RCI breaks Follow the Leader into five “episodes” that alternate with collective interactive voting sections. We’ve done it as a live event and are now developing it for online use, on demand…hopefully it will be ready by fall. What we’re doing is leading viewers – who we consider participants – through a journey that allows for more reflection, deeper engagement, and we think greater fulfillment. Everyone’s responses (to questions about the characters, their views, participants’ own political views and current events relevant to the film’s themes) are reported in real-time, split along demographic lines. So everyone gets a “reality check” about what people are really thinking in relation to what they’re watching, which complements and highlights their own unique reactions.

What we’re trying to create is really an ideal viewing and learning experience for the film, as well as an argument for why people should come out and see it live in a theater. Young people are a core audience for us, and they’re even more open to new modes of storytelling and a viewing experience that promises something different and unpredictable. Test screenings of the film that we’ve had also showed us how differently people reacted to the film given their own political leanings, and we wanted to find a way to make these responses part of the experience while people watched. It wouldn’t work for a film that tells you what to think, but Follow the Leader is more non-judgmental, which allows different readings of it. What we’re doing is turning viewers into active participants who each complete the film for themselves as they watch. It’s new in this context, but in art in general that’s not a new idea at all – we’re just explicit about how every person who sees the film is seeing a different film because of what they bring to it. What we want people to do is play this idea out in a wider political context: What do we experience when we watch a candidate talking or an ad on TV? Are each of us really even “seeing” the same thing?

We’re aiming to collect the data from live events to investigate whether taking part in the experience really does decrease political polarization, and increase cross-partisan understanding and dialogue, like we think it will. We’re working with a growing number of academics on our questions and data collection — research psychology is part of my own background before moving into filmmaking, so it’s not completely out of left field. One concept that we’re finding a particular challenge to consider measuring is whether taking part in Reality Check encourages people to step back and consider whether the leaders we’re getting are the leaders we truly need. That goes to our wider goal for the film & our outreach, which is basically to encourage a deeper conversation, to change the conversation. For the widest exposure, we need to build a way to experience it online and make it available on-demand, and we’re talking with broadcasters and online platforms now about making this happen by the end of the year. So that’s what we’re doing now with a lot of our time…

No…Nick has moved on from Internet TV! But he’s actually something of a pundit all over the media and pops up all over the place. I can’t even keep track really…I think I last saw him talking about Millennials on Al Jazeera’s The Stream.

Nick knew what happened here because the other kid admitted it when he called him…nobody else really had access or could have been the culprit. But while I hesitate to say it was “only” a childhood prank…it wasn’t something the resulted in actual litigation as you see threatened in the film.

Yes…that’s what the film’s about, in a word: change. All my films are about following change over time as it unfolds on-screen. So your question is apt.

Thanks for not giving away any spoilers re: the Deeje’s transformation…but I will say that there are clues to it as early as the first minutes of the film.

As for Ben, he’s actually become more religious since the film was made, and is probably (though I can’t really speak for him) more ardently pro-life that while we were filming. During the making of the film this wasn’t something that he had particular conviction on — but as you suggest he was a party loyalist then as now, and wouldn’t have strayed from that line.

I started to answer this question somewhat in my answer earlier about why I chose the characters I did — but there are several reasons why our main characters are boys. The biggest one is that men are still running the country today, for the most part — and these boys represent the traditional leaders of America. If things are going to change, if we are going to have more diversity, we need to content first with the reality…it is by design that this will inflame some people emotionally (that the film’s about three boys and no girls), but that’s a good thing. That’s how we create change. A film with a diverse set of characters on this topic that makes us feel good about ourselves as Americans doesn’t create the sort of change we often assume it does — and it won’t bring a more diverse viewership into the conversation either like Follow the Leader does…

That said, there are also practical concerns, and as a man in his (then) mid-30s, it was more straightforward for me to make a film about young boys than young girls. I was often on my own on shoots, sleeping on the guys floors and starting to film right when they woke up…and I don’t necessarily think that would have been comfortable for 16-year-old girls or their parents.

I’m guessing none of these guys took shop class. They took business classes probably but we already have a bunch of people who were taught to manage stuff we need leaders who actually know how to do stuff.

But women — and for that matter, largely African-American audiences, of which we’ve had a few theatrically — do love the film. Audiences see the film as our political reality. The questioning along these lines, and the desire for a more diverse base of main characters — for the film to have been made in a somewhat different way, as some (not here) have put it — is something we only get asked by those in the film industry or progressive activists. I know we’re running out of time, but we could have a whole 90 minute chat about this issue alone…

Their parents were supportive, yes — but I chose kids who didn’t really come from classical “political” families…I don’t think they’d be as sympathetic as characters to such a wide portion of people if they were pushed by their family into politics…

I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to get to all your questions — do you want me to wind down and just answer your final ones? I can finish up with a few final comments or stay another short while if you prefer, up to you…

Honesty would other people not their friends describe them as honest or willing to say what ever they have too?
Not only in politics but life given the compassionate conservative and humble nation speeches of Bush and Obama’s lies about everything one has to wonder if politics on both sides attracts liars.

Well thank you, Lisa, Bev & the entire FDL community for such an engaging chat this past 90 minutes! It’s been an honor to be invited and to take part…I hope of course that you will be encouraged to check out the film on iTunes (and many other digital platforms soon) and on PBS stations in your area.

@ThingsComeUndone — the characters in the film have stayed more or less as they are at the end of the film, politically speaking, since we stopped filming…I think we captured a lot of the changes that each of them carries in adulthood. But in terms of overall data, I can’t speak directly to that — other than to say that I think there is a very strong correlation between the political views of parents and their children…why we believe what we believe is a major topic and question of the film, and something that I hope you’ll discuss with those you know once you see it!

Thanks again for this experience, and please feel free to reach out to us directly — via the comment form on our website is as easy way to reach me and others involved in the film. We’d love it if you participated on our Facebook page, engaged us on twitter @changeworxfilms, and generally used the film as a jumping off point for your own thoughtful and reflective discussions about politics, leadership & the future…such a pleasure to be with you on Firedoglake!!!

I think you’d have to ask them if you think it affected their schoolwork — though if it wasn’t politics, it would likely have been something else. As D.J. says, politics is their “sport”…and their are a lot of similarities between sports and how the view politics, especially in their younger years.

Yes, I think there’s an issue here…though I see it being less about not doing that one thing (you’re right that not all of them took shop class), and more about a focus on politics to the exclusion of other pursuits…which I think are necessary for making better leaders. As the boys have turned into young adults, all of them have to some extent branched out…which is healthy for them as people, citizens, and certainly as leaders in a political sense if they choose later in life to continue pursuing that path…

Yes, I suppose you are right…but my point is that this sort of thing is not uncommon today. This is the environment that these proto-politicians have to grow up in if they’re ambitious and putting themselves out there…on the one hand they are public figures, and yet they are only 16 years old! That scene gets a very animated audience response at screenings…but there’s a lot that very serious and consequential for us to discuss here as a society.

Yes, I think that — honesty and dancing around the truth with ‘political’ speech — is an issue for politicians. But that’s also something that’s true for many (shall we say most?) adults at times in their daily lives. We use euphemisms, don’t always say exactly what we mean or give the whole truth. I’m sort of the opposite personally, and it gets me into trouble frankly…I get accused of being anti-social or worse for not having that much of a filter.

But in the film I think you see honesty in these guys…more so than I think we’d see in adult politicians. And you see them becoming more guarded with age too. They’re learning, and even they recognize that. We can’t expect them to be transparent, not completely. Though as I’ve said before in this chat, I think Ben is a particularly good example of honesty and authenticity, whether you agree with him or not. Otherwise, I don’t think I can easily generalize about all three of them, and I know you’re using only the trailer as a jumping off point for your question. Would certainly be glad to engage further on Facebook or Twitter (see comments above for our social media details) once you’ve seen the whole film…

And I’m pleased to say that everyone in the film loves it, and that we’ve had such a warm and enthusiastic response from audiences…really without exception across the political spectrum and across the country. I’m generalizing here, but conservatives (and we’ve screened places like Americans for Tax Reform, for instance) come to the film to “see themselves” and walk away re-considering some of their beliefs in many cases. Progressives come to the film to “know thy enemy” and often come away seeing themselves in some of the characters, or at a minimum having a more nuanced view of people with whom they disagree. All our beliefs come from somewhere…and at the same time we should all rethink them from time to time to see if they still hold true for us…or at least that’s a proposition that I hope people will walk away from the film considering.

As far as other films, we’re currently in production on a few more documentaries in Pakistan, Chile and Cameroon — with our Pakistani project the one that we’re pushing forward most of all these days. If we’re lucky “Two Children of the Red Mosque” (which is another, very different coming-of-age story) will premiere next Spring…perhaps we’ll see you here with our Indian and Pakistani Co-Directors to discuss it.

Until then, thanks again for having me here for FDL Movie Night; thanks for your thoughtful questions; and thanks for letting us know what you think of the film!